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Invisible Gluten Table Monsters

Apart from the amusing nature of a seemingly-floating cell phone, how many other cartoons give you the grandiose beauty of a scenic outlook in such realistic detail? Besides Dilbert, I mean.

Are you gluten free? From what I’ve read, very few people actually have problems with gluten but the vast publicity it has gotten has caused an avalanche of psychosomatic symptoms. Never underestimate the power of suggestion on the human mind. Whatever works for you.

This shrink cartoon is not meant as an insult to transgender folks who actually experience this. It’s just a funny, fictional riff on a factual situation. To those of you who are suffering from this, I would encourage you to be proud of who you are and ignore those who object. Nobody is liked by everyone.

Today’s Godzilla cartoon comes from the fertile mind of my pal, Jim Horwitz, whom I call “JimmyHo.” He does a very different kind of comic called “Watson,” which was nominated this year by the National Cartoonists Society in the Best Short-Form Online Comic category. Congrats and good luck, JimmyHo! See his cartoons on Facebook and LIKE him!

BIZARROVERS: And to round things out, here’s another collaboration with JimmyHo from 2013. That boy’s got some funny ideas.

For the last several months – during the period that we evolved from PEANUTS WILL KILL EVERY LIVING THING to BEWARE GLUTEN – THE SPAWN OF SATAN I’ve been ordering my bakery breads and cakes with “double gluten.” At this point that has not generated even one teeny smile.

I find I have a smirk on my face when I’m buying my as-high-as-I-can-get-it-protein (read “gluten”) bread flour, or placing the resulting loaf on the bar of my favorite beer tasting room. Everyone wants to know what’s in it, and someone always asks beseechingly if it’s gluten free. None of the questioners has ever been a celiac.

Also, there’s the issue of cross-contamination. Was the bacon handled on machinery that is used to handle foods containing gluten? If so, was the machinery cleaned sufficiently and are there small crevices that make sufficient cleaning impossible? Example: slicing machines.

I have a question. What is the significance of the extras in your work? I’ve been enjoying it for years. I always look for them. k2 the little spaceship and so on. I was just wondering. Why? What? Thank you.

You did it again . Comparing the two cities with TV dinners has connected the tickly bone with the head bone without activating the black cat bone . Stouffer’s has an added cup of radiation for the Tokyo dinner , even though I don’t find it a bit funny .

As celiac-er, and proud of it… Not, proud that is. If one accidentally eats a flour tortilla chip and gets raging gas and diarrhea for 3 days from it, they probably aren’t imagining it. There is a fad factor though for some that has no point. When we got agriculture we started eating grains and it probably was more of a problem then. We evolved a few more blood types real quickly after settling down from our scavenging ways.

After decades of ravenous, uncontrollable hunger that nothing could stop and obesity while doing many hours of high-intensity exercise, I finally went to a nutritionist. When the nutritionist heard that my sibling had been diagnosed with celiac disease, she put me on a gluten free diet. She didn’t tell me what I would experience, just to do it.

I didn’t know that celiac disease is genetic and that you have a 1 in 22 chance of having celiac disease if a close relative has it. For the general population it’s 1 in 100 to 1 in 133, depending on the study. When you add in the Non-Celiac Gluten Intolerant (NCGI), it’s 1 in 10 to 1 in 15 people, depending on the study. Most people don’t know they have it because the symptoms can be anything from just obnoxious to being misdiagnosed as other diseases.

Gluten free for almost 1 1/2 years now… I’ve had 9 or 10 celiac disease symptoms clear up as the months pass: food and pollen allergies, regained sense of smell, constipation, diarrhea, etc.

If someone accidentally glutens me now, about a day later, I start passing a lot of very stinky gas for 6 days.

An uncle of mine said he had it luckily just after the time I started to have symptoms. I noted seven. Coincidentally, my doctor did a bone scan on me after I broke a rib way too easily. That revealed osteoporosis, one of the symptoms. Off gluten 5 1/2 years. All obvious symptoms gone. Depressing at first. It’s not a big deal now. I do miss the Tofurky dogs and other good gluten laced meat substitutes, but this is well offset by the lack of symptoms and I can do anything else I did before. Thanks for the added info. Nice initials.

Love the gluten one, too! I’m one of the unlucky people who actually can’t eat gluten and that means that even a tiny amount of it causes severe discomfort. Every time I see those schmucks who eat normal food and then add to that something gluten-free, thinking it’s frickin “healthy”, I want to inject them with insulin because that must be incredibly healthy for everybody if diabetics do it.

I work for a very nice company that is deeply involved with health and nutrition. When you publish a cartoon that touches on those topics (like the ‘gluten’ comic), I often print it and post on the wall outside my office.

But I have a small confession. Some people in the office focused on the ‘secret symbols’ in the cartoons, and thought THAT was what was supposed to be funny (“Ooh, that fellow better watch out for that firecracker! Hahaha!”, “Oh, look, there’s a little piece of pie on the floor – somebody might step on it! Hahaha!”) So now, before I print the cartoon, I usually PhotoShop it to remove most of the symbols. It’s easier than explaining them (and explaining a joke is the most reliable way to kill it), or talking about Al Hirschfeld’s ‘Ninas,’ etc.

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